Is there any risk from accidentally drinking water treated with rotenone?
We certainly don’t recommend that you drink rotenone-treated waters. However, even if people were somehow unaware of the public meetings, notices, news releases, announcements, and signs, and accidentally drank water containing rotenone used to control fish, the risks would be very slight because of the low concentrations used. Rotenone is not readily absorbed by mammals that consume it. A 100-pound person would have to consume between 46 to 78 pounds of 5% rotenone product in order for it to be toxic. Using the same formula, when rotenone is dissolved in water at 0.25 ppm, an average-sized person of 160 pounds would have to drink more than 23,000 gallons of solution at a single time for it to be toxic. A study conducted in 2000 linked rotenone exposure to Parkinson’s Disease-like symptoms in rats. However, the rotenone concentrations used in this study were exponentially higher than those used in fish management, and the rotenone was injected intravenously into the rats for several we